By Joshua Arnold

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) on Monday signed a bill (AB 1955) to keep parents in the dark when their children change their sexual orientation or gender identity at school. The bill responds directly to seven California school districts where parents successfully ran for school board and instituted parental notification policies. California Family Council President Jonathan Keller called the bill “a direct assault on the safety of children and the rights of their parents. … Moms and dads have both a constitutional and divine mandate to guide and protect their kids, and AB 1955 egregiously violates this sacred trust.”

AB 1955 prohibits school districts from adopting policies that would require parental notification of their child’s sexual orientation or gender identity at school. It stipulates, “An employee or a contractor of a school district … shall not be required to disclose any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent unless otherwise required by state or federal law.”

To ensure a comprehensive blackout on informing parents, the law also prohibits school employees from notifying parents and prevents school districts from penalizing school employees who deliberately hide this information from parents.

The California Assembly had originally passed a unanimous bill for the California Department of Education to “encourage and assist local educational agencies to improve and monitor the health of their pupils,” but the Senate scrapped that language and replaced it with the parental notification ban.

“When Newsom signed AB 1955 into law, he provided the pathway for the parents to be lied to, and [he] is allowing secrets to be kept from them,” Joseph Komrosky, former school board president for Temecula Valley USD, told The Washington Stand. “Keeping secrets from parents is intrinsically, morally evil because it uses the innocence of children as a means to an end and, furthermore, devalues their inherent worth.” Komrosky led Temecula Valley USD to adopt a parental notification policy and was rewarded by a teachers’ union-backed recall effort.

“Children do not yet possess the capacity to properly ascertain the longitudinal ramifications of their decisions of changing things like their gender identity, their pronouns, etc.,” Komrosky added. “That’s precisely why they need their parents’ guidance in these life changing decisions. But the governor wants this division between the parent and the child because he thinks he knows what’s best for your children in the public schools.”

An added consequence of this “classic case of government overreach” is that “it further erodes the [low] trust parents already have in the public school systems,” he said.

Despite these disadvantages of the bill, AB 1955 passed through both chambers of the California legislature by overwhelming margins. The California Senate approved the final language by a vote of 29-8 on June 13, and the California Assembly approved it 61-16 on June 27.

Even still, pro-LGBT politicians did not feel quite secure in their supermajority. During a floor debate last month, while Assemblyman Bill Essayli (R) was speaking against the bill, Assemblyman Corey Jackson (D) “had to be restrained from physically confronting” him.

Newsom may have betrayed the same insecurity about how the bill would be received. Local reporter Ashley Zavala noted that “A signing note was not included with this bill, which is sometimes the case with high-profile legislation like this.” In other words, the bill is not too extreme for Newsom to sign, but it is too extreme for him to boast about signing.

Proponents of the legislation claim that it would prevent “forced outing” of students unwilling to share their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression with their parents.

“That’s just categorically false because the students themselves make a public confession” to students, teachers, and other school staff, Komrosky declared. “The only people that are excluded from this public confession are the parents, the most important people in these children’s lives beside God Himself.”

The new California law changes the landscape for ongoing litigation over parental notification policies. Last August, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) sued Chino Valley Unified School District (USD), the first of at least seven California school districts to institute a parental notification policy. Bonta claimed the policy violated California law (before the passage of AB 1955) based on the CDE’s interpretation of the law.

Under most circumstances, the state legislature passing a ban on parental notification policies would be a tacit admission that state law did not previously prohibit such policies. In this case, the facts are a tad more complicated —but only a tad — because the legislature inserted language to argue that this bill “does not constitute a change in, but is declaratory of, existing law.”

Such ventriloquism may supply a fig leaf for the attorney general, but it will only deceive those ignorant of how law works. Since at least the time of the scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, there has been a recognition that content of laws must be clearly communicated, so that the people who will be governed by them clearly know what is and isn’t prohibited. When a state passes a new law “declaratory of” its existing law, that’s a pretty clear indication that its existing law did not, in fact, declare the same thing.

“Who in their right mind thinks it’s a good idea to create and pass laws that make it illegal for parents to be part of their child’s educational experience?” protested Chino Valley USD School Board President Sonja Shaw in a statement provided to The Washington Stand. “Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta, Superintendent [Tony] Thurmond, and the rest of the political cartel have shown their true colors as cowards who prioritize special interests over the voices of parents. … Remember their names and their allies and the harm they have done to families when you vote.”

Some California-based residents and corporations are already voting with their feet, even before election day. This law was “the final straw” for Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). He declared that, “because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies,” he would move the headquarters of SpaceX and X from California to Texas. Tesla’s headquarters officially relocated from California to Texas in 2021.

“Parents are not the enemy,” pleaded Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher (R). “They are critical to a child’s growth and wellbeing, and they have a constitutional right to be involved in their education. This new law says loud and clear that Newsom thinks politicians and school administrators trump parents when it comes to what’s best for kids. He is wrong.”

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.